TV is great for kids -- compared to iPads, says 'Anxious Generation' author
- Joanne Jacobs
- 8 hours ago
- 2 min read
Parents used to worry that watching television would rot kids' minds, but social psychologist Jon Haidt says watching TV is "pretty good" screen time compared to iPad time, which is "really bad" for kids' attention spans.
Of course, he'd prefer kids to spend the time playing outside with other kids -- and without adult supervision. You need a parent to come home to, he says, not a parent who never leaves you alone.
In his bestselling book, The Anxious Generation, Haidt focused on screen time's role in anxiety and depression, but he's now even more worried about "the destruction of human attention," he tells Ezra Klein in the New York Times.
If children watch TV with another person -- ideally a long movie -- they're going to pay attention to characters in "a moral universe," he says. "There are issues of good and bad and norms and betrayal."
In tablet time, they're "solitary" and "they’re not consuming stories — or, if they are, they are 15 seconds long and either amoral or really immoral — disgusting, degrading things, people doing terrible things to each other," Haidt says. They get constant stimulation, which trains them to want more.
He teaches NYU business majors -- most are 19-year-old sophomores -- that they will not be successful unless they regain control of their attention, he tells Klein. "The students who are heavy social media users, who cut down from four hours a day to less than one, get transformative results. They have so much time. They can do their homework. They’re not as distracted. They’re more open to other people."
Young people feel trapped by social media, says Haidt. "We did a survey with the Harris Poll, and 50 percent of Gen Z said they would prefer that TikTok were never invented."
But "they don't want to give it up," Klein says.
"They don’t want to be the only one," says Haidt. "If we could all give it up, then, actually, most of them would do it."
He thinks phone-free schools will be the norm in the next two years.